Extra Life Weekend Catch Up & Week 1 Game Nights 3 and 4

What a crazy weekend of charity fundraising fun we had! As I’ve mentioned before I do two things to support Extra Life:

1) Rachel and I do our month long board game tournament challenge and 2) a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise funds.

This past weekend was the 24 hour charity marathon and it was a huge success! I’m a little exhausted (24 hours with bronchitis is a bit of a body beating) but thrilled that we managed to raise so much money for this great cause. I’m currently sitting at $225 of my $500 goal (which I know I’ll be able to close off this month) and Team Aureus Knights is sitting at $1938 of a $2000 goal.

I want to thank everyone who contributed this weekend, who shared our social media posts, and watched our various live streams – your support made pushing through the hours easy as it could be. We’ve managed yet again to raise money for this wonderful cause and I’m very happy we could make positive changes in children’s lives together.

We need to get back to business though as Rachel and I are knee deep in Week 1 of our Board Game Challenge!

Week 1 Night 3

On Saturday during the charity marathon Rachel and I played our night 3 game. I had lost the previous night at Qwirkle so the game selection was down to me this time. I wanted to pick something that was strategic but approachable because I wanted to live stream the game as part of my Extra Life stream. I decided to go with Powergrid The Card Game, a game Rachel insists she’s no good at but doesn’t realize how good she is. Going in to this game we’re all tied up 1-1 for week 1.

Power Grid The Card Game is a card version of a very popular game with similar mechanics. Power Grid is viewed by some as a good more meaty alternative to monopoly. In the game you are bidding on power plants in an open auction. You then need to purchase resources to power those power plants that then generates money which you use to feed future auction and resource buying cycles. The resource market is really interesting because there’s a limited number of cheap resources available and as people buy up a given resource (one of ore, natural gas, nuclear) it gets more expensive to buy that resource.

The person who wins Power Grid The Card Game is the person who has the most valuable power plants at the end of the game. For a full explanation you can check out this video from Radho Runs Through.

We live streamed this game and you can watch it here:

If you watch the stream you’ll see Rachel though neither of us won in the end. She was pretty certain the AI player had managed to beat us, but in the end Rachel won by a long shot (even if I’m not convinced she realized it). She pulled ahead early (generating more in almost every turn of the game) and I was never able to claw back.

Fair enough, after Night 3 Rachel goes up 2-1.

Week 1 Night 4

So that put night 4 in my hands. I was worn out from the weekend so I wanted to pick a favourite and very fun game. I decided to go with Clank! Clank is one of my favourite games, but for whatever reason (probably my 150 game collection) I haven’t played it in 5-6 months. Clank! is a deck building game with a board. Deck builders are card games where you start with a very small deck and then you build up your resources and cards during the course of the game. Deck builders are one of my favourite genres of game. Clank!’s trick is that it adds a board to the card game. You are raiding a dragon’s dungeon, running in to steal his treasure before he notices and kills you.

For a full explanation of the rules or a deeper look at how Clank plays check out this video by Radho.

I was looking for fun, but man Rachel wasn’t playing around. She came out hard and was leading from about the half way point of the game on. I was trying to down the far side of the board to get the treasure that was worth the most points but she took advantage and grabbed up a bunch of points in the easier reaches of the board. I thought I was dead and looking at losing Week 1.

But then Rachel hit one of the other key elements of this game, and that’s that Clank! is a “push your luck game”. Push your luck games are like Blackjack. In order to win you need to keep going, but go too far and you will lose.

Meet the health track:

Rachel’s colour is yellow. What happens is as you go deeper in the dungeon and make more noise (thus “Clank”) you start to take damage (it’s actually way more cool than that – as you generate clank/noise you put cubes of your colour in to a bag and then when the dragon attacks you blindly pull cubes out of the bag, it’s really tense). You’ll notice that Rachel is 1 damage away from dying in this picture. Well needless to say after this picture was taken Rachel pulled another two of her cubes from the bag and that was the game. Well actually I got to keep playing so I managed to rack up quite the score. We track our scores and win/loss ratios in games (because of course we do) and I wanted to take advantage to put a solid personal best on the board.

In the end I won 136 to Rachel’s 51 points.

So that takes us to all level 2-2 at the end of week 1. It’s all to play for tonight and Rachel has chosen a game she has a 7 wins, 2 loses and 1 draw win record in. I think I might be in for some trouble tonight.